<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 11/17/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Talin</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:talin@acm.org">talin@acm.org</a>&gt; wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Fredrik Lundh wrote:<br>&gt; Talin wrote:<br>&gt;<br>&gt;&gt; I expect to see a series of special-case syntactical work-arounds that<br>&gt;&gt; compensate for the lack of such a feature.<br>&gt;<br>&gt; yeah, because the &quot;special-case syntactical work-arounds&quot; are care-
<br>&gt; fully designed to be *usable* for a well-defined group of *practical*<br>&gt; problems.&nbsp;&nbsp;it's about HCI, not CS.<br>&gt;<br>&gt; please get over this &quot;all I have is a hammer that my CS teacher told<br>&gt; me to use&quot; mode of thinking; we're designing for humans, not wannabe
<br>&gt; language designers who believe in &quot;the one true mechanism&quot;.&nbsp;&nbsp;there are<br>&gt; plenty of other reli^h^h^h^hlanguages for that kind of thinking.<br><br>I don't think that anyone has really answered my fundamental question
<br>yet, which is this: Python is my favorite language, but I use a lot of<br>other languages as well, and there's one feature that I use a lot in<br>those other languages which I miss not having in Python. How is it that
<br>people are so hostile to something that I, and apparently others, find<br>so useful?</blockquote><div><br>Because we have gone down this road on this topic so many times.&nbsp; This is why Guido declared that lambda would not change; it would neither gain nor lose any abilities (except maybe requiring parentheses around its arguments).&nbsp; No one has come up with a good solution, but plenty of people have said, &quot;this is a marvelous feature and as soon as we have it we can do so much!&quot;&nbsp; Well, that's fine but you need to have the good solution before it will be considered. &lt;South Park reference&gt;You need to know what you are going to do with the underpants before you can get rich&lt;/reference&gt;.
<br><br>As Fredrik said, we worry more about HCI than CS.&nbsp; Stating multi-line anonymous functions are a great solution to all of these issues is fine from a theoretical point of view.&nbsp; But the key point is that Python puts usability/practicality before purity.&nbsp; In terms of this argument, it is manifesting itself as resistance to this idea without a concrete proposal for the syntax that people actually like.&nbsp; And that is going to be damn hard when every proposal so far for multi-line anonymous functions has been ugly and not very usable.
<br><br>So one must worry about the usability aspect of this proposal first instead of what it might buy us because if it ain't usable then it ain't worth anything in Pythonland.&nbsp; You have the rationale behind wanting this, which is great and is a good start on a PEP.&nbsp; But now you need to come up with how this feature will manifest itself in the code and be usable.&nbsp; Once you have that all wrapped up in a PEP then people will probably be more receptive to discussing this whole matter.
<br><br>-Brett<br></div></div>